The Hidden Potential of Segmenting Customer Calls
more proactive way to resolve [issues], or proactively give the customer the information that she needs to eliminate that need for [her] to contact a company again and again," Kaiser says.
Kaiser maintains that while more analytics will help companies, the customer segmentation process has to be about more than technology.
"There's a need for more analytical tools. [But] what's required is a multipronged approach that looks at the overall customer service strategy," she says, adding that segmenting customers alone isn't enough--organizations need to also figure out how they want to treat them and track behavior over time. "You need to extract that data but you also need to make it actionable."
Customer Segmentation Challenges
While gathering customer information is enormously helpful, there can be some drawbacks. There is a risk that a company might try to force people into an interactive approach that they might not be comfortable with. Or a company might take missteps in assuming too much based on data.
"How many times have you read a report that says a customer wants something and they don't really want it at all? asks John Ragsdale, vice president of technology research for the Technology Services Industry Association. "You run the risk that when you start modeling behavior, people will have all the same needs, wants, or traits, and that's simply not true."
Bagley warns that when companies use statistical models, it's possible that they might look at a variable of a customer attribute and draw an erroneous correlation. "Sometimes profiles built from your segmentation data are misleading," Bagley says. "You might end up with a profile that represents eighty percent of your population, and while there might be high correlations of churn, it's only because it represents so many people."
Then, of course, there's the issue of incorporating the telephone into an omnichannel environment. Companies often think of contact center segmentation for just the IVR, but it can span different channels. No matter the channel--whether it's through the telephone, Web chat, or Twitter--companies have an opportunity to glean more insight into customer patterns and then compile the information to improve the interaction.
Traditionally a call center has operated in "somewhat of a vacuum," Bagley says, and there weren't a lot of other ways for customers to interact with a company. Web, mobile, and social media channels are changing that picture. Many of these channels also overlap: Agents may coach customers through Web interactions so that they can self-serve later, or customers might be on Facebook while they speak to an agent.
"We're looking at the cross-channel experience," Bagley says. "We're starting to identify some of the shift in the customer base from a single channel interaction. The IVR, chat, Web--all of those things are being tracked."
While cross-channel interactions can be somewhat of a complexity that companies are beginning to wrangle with, there's also opportunity. "Any channel where a customer has contact with your company gives you a chance to start tracking data and find out what issues are driving contact patterns," Kaiser says. "That way, you can better tend to those customer needs."
ClickFox, for example, uses a SaaS model to receive data from its customers. It then assembles customer journeys in a cross-channel perspective. "We assemble those journeys and give them back the visual tools to do their analytics directly against that journey," Bagley says. "We do everything from ingestion to the construction of the journey to even the analytics themselves inside our Web-based user interface."
What's Next for Customer Segmentation?
The evolution of customer segmentation is largely dependent on the nature of variables that companies such as ClickFox are tracking, Bagley says. Determining what attributes are important to a specific business aside from geography, spending, and cost is coming into play. ClickFox is introducing new brand variables around the customer experience, such as how many phone calls a customer has made as compared with his Web interactions in the last month.
"Those types of measures are new to this industry of segmentation," Bagley says. "We're going to see additional companies [that] are going to measure different things, such as how you can determine a person's satisfaction without having to ask those questions. Those are the types of things that will lead the industry to grow."
For Kaiser, the future of customer segmentation is about data, but also about what story the customer's actions are telling a company.
"One of the morals to this story is to listen to what your customers are telling you," she says. "Listen to what their behavior is telling you about who they are and what they want and need. Companies have the data they need. They're just not analyzing it to get the right insights that allow them to respond differently based on how the customer behaves with the company."
Staff Writer Michele Masterson can be reached at mmasterson@infotoday.com.
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